


Cutting Scenes (or, the orbital keeps turning over her)

by orphan_account



Category: Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy - Richard Morgan
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/F, F/M, Female Character In Command, Gender Issues, Object Insertion, POV First Person Canon, Post-Canon, Slice of Life, Uncivil War, not pure porn but contains a sizable chunk of canon-typical sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 10:54:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kovacs has a new body, Sylvie a new consciousness, and the fuck are they lazing about their old ways while the planet convulses to its guts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cutting Scenes (or, the orbital keeps turning over her)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nekonexus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekonexus/gifts).



The wakes rolled through me quick as a virus crashing the Innenin beach. The faint awareness of it registered and then it was yawning me open, my own funeral boat, my own dragging to life all wrong in a room the color of austerity, pale beige almost camouflaging the face before me.

I inhaled. Static on the mind. Check.

— calm pooled up in the wake of my own making. "Been resleeved," Sylvie remarked, as though I wouldn't know from the closeness of her hand on my new breast. The first check of sleeve compatibility is gender everywhere in the Settled Worlds, but her deCom swagger never stuck to rules. "Do you like it?"

"Do you like it?" Info-devoid questions stole time to consider the unwinding pheromones as we laid together in (constant acclimation in the air, the scent of ledgefruit harnessed to population growing and growing) the Araka district of Millsport, the Harlans' unwanted backyard. Sylvie's eyes gleamed with distant curiosity. My sleeve knew her tells and the flat of her stomach and was signaling my brain like a glitched Ragnarok fires bullets, unwanted but always dead on. If it weren't for my conditioning stripping through the bullshit I thought I could remember us happening: her hands on my thigh, crashing the loop between collarbone and ankle. Maybe sexual. The woman seemed to remember something like that.

Not Sylvie, then. Sylvie had claimed to be straight, and while sleeve changes could seriously undermine that certainty, the same phallic queue ringed a face scoured hollow by the weight of the year's tolls.

Nadia Makita watched me. "It could be deceiving," she said, while her fingers beat the seconds on my chest. In Sylvie, just passing time, playing with the remains of tension between us instead of the far more dangerous toys the war employed. In the hitchhiker in her mind, there was the intent fervor with which Quell had spearheaded the Unsettlement now sighted on me. I wasn't sure yet how this sleeve's history would impact us.

I wrenched my mind away from the ghost of a memory, back to the more corporeal ghost with her feet capping my knees. "So, how long's it been? How is it?" I gestured vaguely at the doorway, outside which I hoped some bastards were finally paying their debts. It was hotter than during our hide-and-seek on New Hok.

"The right buildings are falling, so we wait for the current uprisings to run their course. You have been stored a few months while your presence at my side was not symbolically beneficial." She shrugged and leaned in, one elegant lift of her shoulders dislodging more of her drape. Displaying more. Her body, long lines the war had inflicted with a white whorl of scar to match the one on her cheek.

"You can't just do that to me!"

"Why can't I, Kovacssan? Do you accuse me of political expediency? You chose a lifestyle that made you into freight for decades at a time. You surely weren't expecting to personally sacrifice any less for everything you demand justice for than you did to slice up your colleagues."

Envoy training sewed up the instinctive laceration of rage. I decided not to hold my time in the locker against her. Something in Nadia, as I listened to her disseminate her ideas like a propaganda drone but with charisma and flexibility they never attained, had already put its slim fingers around the anger I had nurtured across seventeen worlds and wrenched. I wasn't crawling at the feet of her ideology, but I was hooked.

Her accent too had been touched. The need to sound like her new troops had stripped off the archaic lilt like the barrels of old whisky I'd grappled open, days before a mine exploded under me, to find the newest grav displacers Keijswin Systems produced under its newly sympathetic exec. Persuasion— the kind of physical persuasion our power brokers understood— rising from old things. An old accent, an old inequality. It wouldn't do for Quellcrist Falconer to sound more like the old money she was burning than the Millsport twang and corroded Amanglic that swelled her ranks.

"The Protectorate's still pissing its soldiers away against the orbitals."  
In the middle of the sentence Sylvie returned. She withdrew to the distance of the warily friendly, knees swinging along the bed. "The eighth Brigade, uh, persuaded some remorse-ridden Kawahara—"

"Who?"

For a moment a basilica hung before me, splintering, screaming in the way politicians do when hurt, lit by nothing but personal vendetta after I shoved a woman into the sea. You never knew with resleeving and cross-sleeving, although remorse did not sound like the cold-blooded traitor to the human race I'd blown open—

"Jesus, I keep forgetting you're not up with recent history. A First Family in all but name. One of their younger sons thought a suicide mission would clear his head if not his family's crimes. He blew out the interstellar 'caster. No blood-fire-and-betrayal Envoys. None of the bad boys from beyond the stars to interfere, just our planetary friends and every weapon the minds who thought up mimints can churn out."

"Those a problem?"

"They're as enthusiastic as a datarat told to tunnel under the ocean. Useless against angelfire."

Something tensed in her knuckles at the thought. I jumped on it. "What's the problem, then?"

She half-lidded her eyes, looked somewhere left and down. Accessing the nets, probably. "The orbitals aren't that hard to talk to."

"So?"

"Micky, use your much vaunted intelligence. The gear they downloaded Nadia into, or the gear they used to download her into me, the gear I'm convincing them to fight for us with, isn't far past deCom standard. Several Renouncer monasteries have something similar, and even if they're basking in the ecstasy of being right about human progress, we've priests and black market channels from here to Drava to contend with."

"I could..." I thought about it, waited for intuition to piece together something in my head.

Funny how the conditioning supposedly so useful to Nadia in this war was implanted in me by some people with vested interest in maintaining power.

Quell twisted her features now. "The facts are, millions of potential places where those clinging to their posts will make the same calculations we did, and try the same saviors. The facts are, we need the part of this war that has to do with people to coalesce like belaweed balls, and they're slow in the realization of what they're tossing away. Right here, the chance to reverse a process calcified into every flicking settlement of our race." She was rattled enough to start quoting herself. "War is like any other bad relationship. Are we going to be any better off when we get out?"

"Right," I said, because as soon as Nadia came back to the foreground the awareness of the body she and Sylvie shared slipped back too. Whoever said all chemistry is physical was an idiot. Whoever said, Quellcrist Falconer actually, politics was the less satisfying outlet of sexual desire never mentioned the corollary.

She noticed my eyes' direction and snorted. "My problem. Hormones will rule you more securely than the Harlans, when it comes down to it."

"You still believe that with this sleeve?"

"There were other sleeves available, but I chose this one for you," she answered indirectly.

Then she had her hands out of their pensive posture and on my legs. Much like she used to supplant Sylvie whenever stress cracked the baffles open, now she surged against me with the war continuing outside. I still didn't know what precisely was happening out there and didn't need to know, not then, not yet. We were in the beats of rests between one movement and the next.

"Do you know why I have to?"

I served as a refined form of stress relief.

Something to remember when ripping apart governments: Even figures elevated to godhood are as human as the mass consciousness that worships them. The pressure she created for herself raced along the skeins of her control. Pressuring the corridors of power. All those triangles with tops overweighting their bases.

Steady pressure of her palm over my heart. Beat too fast, but didn't everything these days?

"I know," I said, because the fit of my new waist was perfect against her wrist. Had she partnered with this body before I inhabited it? Yes, her teeth just sharp enough as she bit above my pelvic bone. "I know."

I had been in female bodies before, but I'd never tried to fuck anyone in them. I thought it was because I was resolutely straight as well—

— though there was that one time with Oishii, me still in the gecko's sleeve, spines protruding along his arm. He'd said, "You're not in this," and slapped away my flaccid cock, walked out to find someone worthy of him or go back to work on the Daikoku Dawn's systems—

Nadia Makita informed me I had only held back because I was a coward.

I ripped at my bodysuit. For once I was glad my sleeve was designed more for aesthetics than for combat. We rolled back the sheets and her mouth went straight for my breasts, tongue in quick flicks across my nipples, while she unraveled what remained of her top. My stomach coiled. I traced my fingers down her spine and dug in my nails to make her arch. She retaliated with a protracted trail of tongue, sucking on my neck in a way I'd remember in the morning, trailing down to my open legs.

Virginia, I recalled, with a pang that was not guilt: _You take what is offered—_

Nadia's eyes were sharper than shrapnel. I could, had, dug shards of metal out of the flesh but not want, not belief, not the conviction of her ribboning my defenses.

She stroked my inner thighs until I started quivering. Thrust up in a shaky analogue of having my cock ridden. She smiled at me, a tolerable curve, and ground the heel of her hand against my clit. Her thumb, after, through the wet creases of my body, rubbing back and forth in a way that reminded me of opening an antique palm lock. Long dark hair scratching my breasts as her mouth returned to my throat and then my lips. The sex of your body doesn't make much difference in tongue-to-tongue. Her kiss was messy and hard, with all the intensity of a woman who could ignite everything around us, and teeth got in the way when I tried to lick back against her cheek. Her arm crooked against my side and her fingers still traced my clitoris.

Then she curved back to put that slick shining mouth lower on my body.

"Nadia," I managed.

"Quell." Both promise and order. I sunk into the bed and the last I saw of her for several minutes was Quell who knew a hell of a lot more than I did about this, that crooked open-mouthed grin descending—

 _and sometimes—_

Merge Nine had nothing on the experience of actually being in a female sleeve when she pushed her tongue against my cunt. My body had done this before and its reflexes shoved my groin against her lips. All the heat of Millsport summer shot through the oval she licked inside me. Two fingers into my mouth, deeper than I'd ever gone down anyone's throat, until I was choking for air against her and I tightened down through my legs—

 _that has to be—_

I trembled. She grinned at me. Somehow she wrapped her other hand around my hip and wrenched until my cheek lay on the taut skin over her cleft and hers over mine. Her facial scar chafed, her toes curled toward me, the muscles of someone who fought as well as directed a war moved under her skin: flashes of compulsive noticing, sideshows to the fucking. The fingers were out of my throat, back to the pattern that circled the rim of my perception as easily as my clit. I touched the reddening flesh of hers with my tongue, tasted salt, the musk of her and, well, my background in eating cunt is extensive. Somewhere in the rhythmic strokes of my tongue high up and in, I remembered I hadn't come yet and that was all it took. Liquid out of me all over her face. So warm as I shook under her mouth, licking me up with the shameless confidence of a woman who knew what she was capable of and the momentum she carried. Men often grew complacent in that knowledge, especially on places like Sharya where they were usually accurate. Quell knew what she was fighting with in the darkening skies over Millsport.

But then the orbital problem was so far out of my head I'd've had to fly to the Earth UN Court to retrieve it.

Surge of gorgeous memory.

And then she did something I'd never thought of before. Alright, in the bubblefabs on mimint ground, when my imagination created a thousand ways for me to live and die daily, it had probably occurred to me. The actual experience of it...

 _— fucking_ incredible.

She rolled her fingers over the black ridges of her central cord. I felt more than saw her preparing, with her legs closed tight over my head. The dark mass plunged into my body, thicker than my prick had ever felt going into something else. One of the ridges still smudged in neon light caught on the creases of my wet labia. My inner muscles clenched on pure sensation. She still tongued over my clit as sensation rose and rose, all of it indistinguishable in the massive upwelling of pleasure between my legs, my hands scrabbling over the knobs of her spine. She was fucking me with the knowledge in her head. Nadia, all of Nadia, the more-than-apparition reborn in that cord deep in my cunt. Religion had nothing on it. The Brotherhood of the Awoken and Aware, I wondered with an edge of hysteria. What would they think of me and Sylvie's sleeve awakened like this? The filthy beauty of the cord thrusting in and out, massaging new angles inside my flesh until I screamed.

Shades of fluorescence.

Orgasm was almost an afterthought.

I came until the number of times seemed unimportant and found my hair bunching from her side of the sex. I touched my sticky breasts as if I'd never seen myself before and rolled over to lap at her neck.

Despite my celebrated Envoy cool she pulled herself out of our wet tangle first. The shadow of a refractory period, ingrained in my head if not my very willing body, weighted me down. I tried coughing.

"Quell?"

"You're talking to Sylvie Oshima now," she said, touching my breast with a tentativeness at odds with the bravado of her words.

"Thought you—"

"We both thought wrong." I couldn't walk away from another round, one of the perks of this sleeve, and the sleeve too still ached with familiarity. This time was languid and more sensual than erotic before she melted back into Nadia. We lay there for a while correcting our respective misconceptions.

"Did you like it?"

"Yeah," I said, still stoned somewhere from the pleasure of the last night. "I did, very much."

She sat up with seriousness relighting her face. Her voice was still the throaty huskiness that had shredded my inhibitions the last night, but it was now flavored like ledgefruit tea, a hint of bitterness in the depths. "The person who lived in this sleeve before you has family in Kossuth. You've been there. Family who, even if they acknowledge her, would think her a traitor to her birth, for voluntarily putting herself into the servant sex. Do you understand that?"

I turned away. "Change something, then. Fuck her family."

"There are some things ingrained at us at the genetic level—"

"Like the Qualgrist Protocol? Like that worked."

"— that's not relevant to this discussion, Kovacs, as you're very well aware. She will be back in a few weeks. We'll find you one of those Khumalo sleeves you're used to before then."

"And?" Nadia usually explained, in excruciating slashes of detail, what she meant, but then I was struggling to patch myself into normal operation myself in the aftermath of the lights behind my eyelids.

"You'll only have visiting hours in this sleeve," she said. "Some of us have to live in ours."

"You could give Sylvie back."

"Some of us never choose our bodies either." She pinned me with those eyes again. The takeover of the sleeve tensing to stand, though, was an old argument becoming obsolete by the blurring of the lines between Sylvie and her other occupant.

Just an old argument, that's all.

I cycled into the next one. "What are the Crag boys choosing to do for the war?"

Right and down her eyes rotated, a visual aid to the argument inside her head. Who would most convincingly relate the news. I invented the myth of two distinct psyches, Sylvie said once, as she and Quell oscillated through the foreground to the rhythm of incendiaries bursting above our rathole. The orbitals flensed my gear's barriers because we fit together.

Like a knife and a body to stick it in, I had said.

Like that Tebbit of yours and its fucking poison. How you've had that accompany you 'til now, I'll never get, but they were made to kill together.

I'd answered, And you think I'm the one dead inside. Another conversation we never completed because our ceiling buckling in on burning stilts took priority.

"DeCom. They took some deCom, showed them the party fuel of wrecking karakuri and none of the shitting in the woods. Maybe they're going to deCom an orbital at one point, yeah?" She snorted, as convinced of the efficacy of their cause as Isa the harlequin the week before she died.

I scanned the bare room. "You have my equipment stashed somewhere?"

"Didn't bother, Micky."

I chalked the twinge inside me up to the foam of anger. Just an edge of it, almost sweet. "I'm going to chase down some more, then."

Nadia's tongue prodded her cheek. "Our patriarchal bearded citymates are in full force on the streets. Be ca— there are situations you should wait to involve yourself in, out there, for when you're in a disposable sleeve."

"I don't know. You tell me about all the crap we're facing again and you expect me not to kill the responsible bastards?"

She found an orange shawl in the nest of bed sheets and offered it to me. She ran Sylvie's hands through the midnight furrows of Sylvie's hair, free from headscarf. I thought of it decorating some methhead mercenary's trophy wall instead of lashing out uselessly at Nadia for exploiting my weaknesses. Sylvie Oshima, Tanya Wardani, Kristin Ortega, Sarah Sachilowska, Nao Kovacs. Anger and vulnerability, Tak. You used to channel one into blood and the other into blood too, someone else's spilled where the Protectorate could glide away, casually ignorant.

So when the volume of an altercation between a couple of Beards and a couple of women finally sunk into my head, I twitched but kept my new gun to myself. The Sigrun X53, pet name the Ass, was the only hybrid ever made of a particle thrower and a neural demarcator. Half illegal, half too good to bother improving, its namesake butt was reassuringly painful for the young man who bumped into me as I wandered back out on the street with the safety on under my thumb.

I found other tidbits to eavesdrop on. I had lost months of admiring local color, and as I abstained from shooting anyone I picked up some of the slack.

"— those deCom psychos can. Put virals in stacks in the flesh—"

"— whole street flaring up like a cooking fire, the smell—"

"Woman! You will—"

"— ledgefruit is ridiculous, how does anyone expect to eat in—"

Araka, one of the last districts aristos went slumming, straggled over dilapidated wharves and non-smiles so embedded with the risk of organic death or injury that it granted an expensive sleeve walking it the title of survivor. People in the market were willing to elbow even the guy with the big gun, their pushiness exacerbated by their eagerness to get the cheap staples before they sold out.

"— orbitals, man. Not their usual flicking act, just like that, shot my neighbor's—"

"— Mecsek closed the socials down permanently-"

"— wharf closed too, and the fucking checkpoints, my brother can't bring his pay through-"

"— suicide runs in the North, trying to shoot one down—"

"— tell you, it's deCom's fault—"

"— my listeners! Come hear how to defend yourself against deCom corruptions—"

"Watch where you're going!"

The Envoy intuition started piecing together the growing cackle of fear in the air. Fear, and fear of deCom tech at that. A few Quellist guerillas could accomplish a lot more if disguised by the giant upwelling of the angry and scared in places like this. I considered how to aim it, automatically seeing people in my peripheral vision but not analyzing them individually.

Nadia chewed her tongue when I told her of the conversations I had heard. "I could ask the cleaner consciences in the Black Brigades to start up a focused propaganda effort."

"They're fighting troops. He who models the northern waves for all the hours of his life would do best to avoid surfing them."

"We've been specializing since you last slept. They don't fancy themselves capable of doing everything, Kovacs."

"And what happened to 'There are some arenas so corrupt the only clean acts are nihilistic'?"

"I wrote that a fucking long time ago," she said, "I've grown up since then."

I laughed honestly. She progressed from rejection to creation, a reverse of how cynicism usually developed in we who knew revolution is dirty shit. Sylvie, from the fetal ball on the Daikoku Dawn, Nadia, from the wraith that had to dream to find herself, from an academia stratified by depth of adherence to dogma. The wild sheen of her electrified hair to more data skimming sleek under that elder face than the entire planet drank from at her birth. To her guiding humanity, like a parent with a mean left hook and a sharp tongue for epigrams, and stepping back gracefully to let the new generation rule themselves. Or, excuse me, let demodynamics make of the world what we should. Reflexive violence roots in me far deeper than philosophy.

I didn't think she would succeed.

But as the door collapsed forward like a woman sated to a bed, nobody was stopping me from pointing my gun toward the sunlight.

**Author's Note:**

> Yuletide treat for Nekonexus/tessercat. My intractable muse ran away with your prompts, sorry— hope you enjoyed nonetheless!
> 
> Depiction ≠ endorsement. The meta thoughts I ended up cutting from this fic probably outnumber the sentences remaining. My tl;dr thoughts on Takeshi's relationship to gender and How Quellism Would Actually Work, please don't let me show you them.
> 
> All thoughts/kinds of feedback are welcome and appreciated!


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